How to play
You have to use the mouse and its three buttons (with two-buttoned mouses, clicking the middle button is generally achieved by simultaneously pressing the left and the right buttons) to uncover or to flag the cases. Here are the details :
The left button will uncover a case. If there is a bomb below that case, the bomb will explode, and the game will be over
If there is not a bomb under the case, a number will appear. That is the number of neighboring cases that do have bombs under them. Which ones you ask? Thats the point of the game.
For each box (excluding edge and cornerboxes), there are 8 neighboring boxes.
If none of the neighboring boxes has a bomb, then a blank will be shown under the case, and all neighboring boxes will be automatically uncovered.
Left clicking a flagged case is secure and does nothing.
The right button will mark a case as containing a mine (draw a red flag) or, if the option is set, as being uncertain (draw a question mark). The uncertain tag can be useful when you are puzzled about the positions of mines.
The middle button will clear the surrounding cases if there is the right number of cases already flagged. It is very useful since it is much quicker than uncovering all individual cases.
If your flags are not properly positionned, you will explode on a bomb.
Pressing the yellow smiley will start a new game.
These are the default settings. The mouse buttons can be reprogrammed. For more information, see the section entitled Game Options.

The Screen
The Screen
The Screen
The screen consists of:
A Box showing you the number of mines still left to be marked. Everytime you flag a bomb site, this number will decrease by one.
This box does not determine if you are right or wrong, but only how many mines you need to theoretically mark before you are done with this game.
In this example, there are 10 mines to be marked.
A Yellow Smiley Face. Clicking this will start a new game. If you loose the game, it will become a frown.
The box on the right, shows how much time this round has taken. The shortest time for each level, gets to list their name as the high score.
The playing area. This will vary in size depending on the difficulty level of the game. In this example, it consists of 64 boxes. This is where you play the game.
A status line at the bottom of the window. In this example, it simply says Game stopped.